In recent years, individuals and businesses have increasingly turned to UAVs or other unmanned vehicles to capture digital aerial content. Indeed, because of the relatively low cost of UAVs in comparison to conventional aircraft, individuals and businesses can now utilize UAVs to perform flight missions and capture digital aerial images or digital aerial videos of a variety of different ground sites. For example, it is becoming increasingly common to utilize UAVs to capture digital aerial images of sites for construction, land management, mining, activity tracking, or other applications.
In addition, as a result of the increased availability of digital aerial images captured by UAVs, some conventional systems have begun to utilize digital aerial images to generate three-dimensional models. For example, conventional modeling systems can now utilize digital aerial images to generate a model of a construction site, allowing users to evaluate construction progress of structures as they are built.
Although conventional modeling systems can generate three-dimensional models of a site, they also have a number of significant problems. For example, conventional modeling systems can require a significant amount of time and processing power to analyze digital aerial images and generate three-dimensional models of a site. To illustrate, a conventional modeling system utilizing two-hundred digital aerial images of a site can take up to one hour to generate a three-dimensional representation of the site. Many users often express frustration with the amount of time required to generate three-dimensional site models.
Not only do conventional modeling systems require a significant amount of time to generate three-dimensional models of a site, but the amount of time can vary significantly from one application to the next. For instance, the amount of time and processing power required to generate a three-dimensional representation of a site can increase quadratically (or exponentially) as the number of digital aerial images of a site increases. For example, although conventional modeling systems can require up to an hour to generate a three-dimensional representation of a site from two-hundred digital aerial images of the site, conventional modeling systems can require up to twenty hours to generate a three-dimensional representation of a site from two-thousand digital aerial images. The amount, and variability, of time required to generate three-dimensional models from digital aerial images is a significant drawback to conventional modeling systems. Indeed, it is difficult for users to meet processing deadlines when the amount of time required to process a three-dimensional model is not only exorbitant but variable on a per-project basis.
Accordingly, a number of problems and disadvantages exist with conventional systems for generating three-dimensional models utilizing digital aerial images captured by a UAV.